Iron Mountain ski jump

Sunday, April 3, 2016

SHARING A WHITE CORVAIR

We buried Donna’s mother
yesterday. Ophia was widowed at age 54. She lived to be 108. She was a widow
half her life.

When Earl died, she had
never driven. 54 years ago, families had one car, and the man used it to go to
work. When you went to church or the grocery, you went together, and the man
drove.

They lived outside of
town, so when Earl died, Ophia had to learn to drive, and she had to get a car.
She chose a white Corvair. [1] She loved that car! No wonder. Think of what it
must have meant to her in terms of freedom and identity.

She didn’t go far, so the
miles didn’t add up quickly. When she could no longer drive, she did not want
to sell her beloved car to just anyone. She wanted it to have a new owner who
would love it like she did. She chose Derek Barton.

She chose well. Each year
on her birthday, Derek would come get her and take her for a ride in her car.
Even her first few years in the nursing home. When she became too feeble to
leave the home, Derek would come to her room and tell her about her car.

None of us really owns
anything. The world belongs to all of us. It’s okay to share, because the world
is precious to us all.

The procession to the
cemetery yesterday was led by a white Corvair.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1] Not to be confused with
a Corvette. The Corvair inspired Ralph Nader to write Unsafe at Any Speed.

My youthful ambition was
to be a journalist, and write a column for a newspaper. So I think of this blog
as an online column. I started it several years ago, when we followed the
grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper
Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, ”Reflections on Faith from
a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter
even in the summer!” [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.]
We no longer live in “the place of winter.” The grandchildren grew up, so in
May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s
not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so
I continue to work at understanding what it means to be a follower of Christ in
winter…

I tweet as yooper1721.

They called them heroes. They
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Zander lost his mind. Four homeless and hopeless Iraqistan VETS who
accidentally end up living together on an old school bus. With nowhere to go,
and nothing else to do, they lurch from one VAMC to another, getting no help
because, like the thousands of other Iraqistan VETS who are homeless,
unemployed, and suicidal, they do not trust the system and refuse to “come
inside.” After another fruitless stop, at the VAMC in Iron Mountain, Michigan,
a doctor is found dead, and the VETS are accused of his murder. Distrustful,
strangers to America, to each other, and even to themselves, they must become a
unit to learn who really murdered the doctor, so that they can be free. In
doing so, they uncover far more, about themselves and about their country, than
they dared even to imagine. VETS is
available from your local independent book store, Amazon, Barnes & Noble,
BOKO, Books-A-Million, Black Opal Books, and almost any place else that sells
books. $12.99 for paperback, and $3.99 for ebook. Free if you can get your
library to buy one.